cult one; but
"where there is a will there is a way," and what colonization needs most
is a hearty will. Will springs from the two elements of moral sense and
self-interest. Let us be brought to believe it is morally right, and
at the same time favorable to, or at least not against, our interest to
transfer the African to his native clime, and we shall find a way to do
it, however great the task may be. The children of Israel, to such numbers
as to include four hundred thousand fighting men, went out of Egyptian
bondage in a body.
How differently the respective courses of the Democratic and Republican
parties incidentally, bear on the question of forming a will--a public
sentiment--for colonization, is easy to see. The Republicans inculcate,
with whatever of ability they can, that the negro is a man, that his
bondage is cruelly wrong, and that the field of his oppression ought
not to be enlarged. The Democrats deny his manhood; deny, or dwarf to
insignificance, the wrong of his bondage; so far as possible crush all
sympathy for him, and cultivate and excite hatred and disgust against
him; compliment themselves as Union-savers for doing so; and call
the indefinite outspreading of his bondage "a sacred right of
self-government."
The plainest print cannot be read through a gold eagle; and it will be
ever hard to find many men who will send a slave to Liberia, and pay
his passage, while they can send him to a new country--Kansas, for
instance--and sell him for fifteen hundred dollars, and the rise.
TO WILLIAM GRIMES.
SPRINGFIELD, ILLINOIS, August, 1857
DEAR SIR:--Yours of the 14th is received, and I am much obliged for the
legal information you give.
You can scarcely be more anxious than I that the next election in Iowa
should result in favor of the Republicans. I lost nearly all the working
part of last year, giving my time to the canvass; and I am altogether
too poor to lose two years together. I am engaged in a suit in the United
States Court at Chicago, in which the Rock Island Bridge Company is a
party. The trial is to commence on the 8th of September, and probably will
last two or three weeks. During the trial it is not improbable that
all hands may come over and take a look at the bridge, and, if it were
possible to make it hit right, I could then speak at Davenport. My courts
go right on without cessation till late in November. Write me again,
pointing out the more striking points of difference be
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